Monday, July 29, 2019
Hello! We’re
Katie Fritz Fogel and
Selam Tilahun, Research Associates at
Rainbow Research, a nonprofit evaluation and applied community research firm in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
In
Flipping the Script: White Privilege and Community Building, Sally Leiderman challenges evaluators to imagine
“What would anti-racist evaluation look like?”We see evaluation as one tool for anti-racist community building through creating employment pathways in evaluation for BIPOC, queer and poor youth as well as youth with disabilities.
As meaningful as we find
participatory evaluation processes—including training and paid compensation for youth to co-create, implement, and benefit from evaluation processes and products—when such projects end, youth evaluators typically revert to being ‘just’ youth. Meanwhile, we continue in our roles as the ‘expert’ evaluators. Evaluation firms have an opportunity and obligation to shift this power dynamic by creating employment pathways for youth that lead to permanent and sustainable employment in evaluation or related fields.
We’re not there yet, but working on it. We’ve been practicing multiple ways to promote youth in evaluation roles: engaging and supporting teams of young adults through participatory evaluation projects
(YPAR-model); introducing high school summer interns to short-term, intensive evaluation work experiences; and hosting college student interns.
Lessons Learned: Facilitate youth participatory evaluation experiences intentionally, with a lens toward ongoing employment.
- Encourage youth to see the experience as job training, and pay them. Create time to discuss how the skills they are practicing (e.g., customer service, community engagement) through evaluation apply to other fields. Help them update their resumes accordingly.
- Share your social capital. Explicitly give youth permission to contact you afterwards to facilitate informational interviews or serve as a reference. We’ve been surprised by how many youth involved in short-term projects take us up on this!
Hot Tips and Cool Tricks: Host young adults as evaluation interns.
- Assume that youth employees come with experiences that add value to the work. Assume they have ideas, knowledge, and expertise to share.
- Prepare staff to reframe their roles to include mentor and role model.
- Train staff in how to give productive feedback and create a work climate that supports growth among staff of all ages and experience levels.
- When reviewing work with them, ask youth evaluators questions that promote critical thinking and reflection.
- Support youth when they make mistakes. It’s important that interns, like all of us, have opportunities to try new things and potentially not have them pan out as expected.
- Pay interns as professionals!
Rad Resources: Many organizations can help you connect with youth who want summer- or semester-long internships:
Hot Tip for visitors to Minnesota for Evaluation 2019:Rainbow Research’s offices are located in a very hip part of town. We’re nearby the
Minneapolis Chain of Lakes Regional Park,
Walker Art Center and Sculpture Gardens, the
American Swedish Institute (where the Turnblad Mansion is a sight to see!), and In the
Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater. Any of these places would be a great way to get a taste of the Twin Cities.
We’re looking forward to the fall and the Evaluation 2019 conference all this week with our colleagues in the Local Arrangements Working Group (LAWG). Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to contribute to aea365? Review the contribution guidelines and send your draft post to aea365@eval.org.
About AEA
The American Evaluation Association is an international professional association and the largest in its field. Evaluation involves assessing the strengths and weaknesses of programs, policies, personnel, products and organizations to improve their effectiveness. AEA’s mission is to improve evaluation practices and methods worldwide, to increase evaluation use, promote evaluation as a profession and support the contribution of evaluation to the generation of theory and knowledge about effective human action. For more information about AEA, visit www.eval.org.
American Evaluation Association
Washington, DC
202-367-1223.